研究僧丨如何阅读一篇论文

这是我在看论文时无意刷到的博客推荐的一篇文章"How to Read a Paper"，教你怎么样看论文。对于研究生来说，看论文基本是日常，一篇论文十多二十页，如何高效地读论文确实非常重要，我也看了不少论文，有了一些体会，这篇文章介绍的方法值得参考。

原文来自https://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/keshav/home/Papers/data/07/paper-reading.pdf

这里还发现了翻译成中文的版本:https://wenku.baidu.com/view/8738405349d7c1c708a1284ac850ad02de8007c3.html

three-pass approach

Researchers spend a great deal of time reading research papers. However, this skill is rarely taught, leading to much wasted effort. This article outlines a practical and efficient three-pass method for reading research papers. I also describe how to use this method to do a literature survey.

**key idea: **read the paper in up to three passes instead of starting at the begining and plowing to the end(用三步法取代从头读到尾的方式)

• The first pass

  give you a general idea about the paper(对论文建立整体的认识)

• The second pass

  let you grasp the paper's content, but not its details(把握论文的内容而非细节)

• The third pass

  help you understand the paper in depth(深度理解论文)

The first pass

• The first pass is a quick scan to get a bird’s-eye view of the paper. You can also decide whether you need to do any more passes. This pass should take about five to ten minutes and consists of the following steps (鸟瞰论文并决定是否继续阅读，该步骤大概占用5-10min)

1. Carefully read the title, abstract, and introduction(仔细阅读标题,摘要和简介)
2. Read the section and sub-section headings, but ignore everything else(阅读章节和小节标题,忽略所有内容)
3. Glance at the mathematical content (if any) to determine the underlying theoretical foundations(浏览数学内容以确定潜在的理论基础)
4. Read the conclusions(阅读结论)
5. Glance over the references, mentally ticking off the ones you’ve already read(浏览参考文献,勾选读过的文章)

• At the end of the first pass, you should be able to answer the five Cs:(阅读完第一遍,需要回答以下问题)

1. Category: What type of paper is this? A measurement paper? An analysis of an existing system? A description of a research prototype?(这篇论文的类别是什么?)
2. Context: Which other papers is it related to? Which theoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?(这篇论文内容跟什么相关,理论基础是什么?)
3. Correctness: Do the assumptions appear to be valid?(所有的假设都有效吗?)
4. Contributions: What are the paper’s main contributions?(这篇论文的主要贡献是什么)
5. Clarity: Is the paper well written? (这篇论文是否简洁明了)

The second pass

• In the second pass, read the paper with greater care, but ignore details such as proofs. It helps to jot down the key points, or to make comments in the margins, as you read.Dominik Grusemann from Uni Augsburg suggests that you note down terms you didn’t understand, or questions you may want to ask the author." If you are acting as a paper referee, these comments will help you when you are writing
  your review, and to back up your review during the program committee meeting. (稍微仔细阅读第二遍,忽略一些细节如证明.记下关键点,在旁白评论有助于阅读)

1. Look carefully at the figures, diagrams and other illustrations in the paper. Pay special attention to graphs. Are the axes properly labeled? Are results shown with
   error bars, so that conclusions are statistically significant? Common mistakes like these will separate rushed, shoddy work from the truly excellent. (仔细关注论文中的数字,图标和插图)
2. Remember to mark relevant unread references for further reading (this is a good way to learn more about the background of the paper) (标记未读的参考文献以进一步阅读)

• The second pass should take up to an hour for an experienced reader. After this pass, you should be able to grasp the content of the paper. You should be able to summarize the main thrust of the paper, with supporting evidence, to someone else. This level of detail is appropriate for a paper in which you are interested, but does not lie in your research speciality(对于有经验的读者,第二遍要花一个小时。结束这一遍你应该抓住文章的内容并能够将支持论文的论据总结给其他人。)

The third pass

To fully understand a paper, particularly if you are a reviewer, requires a third pass. The key to the third pass is to attempt to virtually re-implement the paper: that is,
making the same assumptions as the authors, re-create the work. By comparing this re-creation with the actual paper,you can easily identify not only a paper’s innovations, but also its hidden failings and assumptions. (第三遍论文的核心在于复现论文:建立与作者相同的假设,复现其工作。通过这种方法,你可以轻易地指出论文的创新点和其隐藏的缺陷和假设。)

This pass requires great attention to detail. You should identify and challenge every assumption in every statement.Moreover, you should think about how you yourself would present a particular idea. This comparison of the actual with the virtual lends a sharp insight into the proof and presentation techniques in the paper and you can very likely add this to your repertoire of tools. During this pass, you should also jot down ideas for future work.(这一遍要注重每个细节,应该考虑如何呈现自己的想法)

This pass can take many hours for beginners and more than an hour or two even for an experienced reader. At the end of this pass, you should be able to reconstruct the entire structure of the paper from memory, as well as be able to identify its strong and weak points. In particular, you should be able to pinpoint implicit assumptions, missing citations to relevant work, and potential issues with experimental or analytical techniques. (这一遍会占用初学者很多时间,完成这一遍后，应该能通过记忆重构整篇论文的结构并指出论文的优点缺点。特别地，你应该能确立隐含的假设，缺失的工作引用和实验和分析中的潜在问题)

Doing a Literature survey

阅读论文的方法同样适用于文献调查，什么样的论文需要读，同样用三步法。

1. First, use an academic search engine such as Google Scholar or CiteSeer and some well-chosen keywords to find three to five recent highly-cited papers in the area. Do one pass on each paper to get a sense of the work, then read their related work sections. You will find a thumbnail summary of the recent work, and perhaps, if you are lucky, a pointer to a recent survey paper. If you can find such a survey, you are done. Read the survey, congratulating yourself on your good luck(首先,通过文献检索找到近3-5年该领域的高引论文，在每篇论文上读一遍并读他们的related work。你会找到最近工作的概要，幸运的话能找到survey)
2. Otherwise, in the second step, find shared citations and repeated author names in the bibliography. These are the key papers and researchers in that area. Download the key papers and set them aside. Then go to the websites of the key researchers and see where they’ve published recently. That will help you identify the top conferences in that field because the best researchers usually publish in the top conferences (找到重复引用的作者名字，他们的论文是该领域的重要工作。下载核心的论文并放在一边,访问他们的网站并看他们最近的发表工作,这将帮助你识别该领域的顶级会议)
3. The third step is to go to the website for these top conferences and look through their recent proceedings. A quick scan will usually identify recent high-quality related work. These papers, along with the ones you set aside earlier, constitute the first version of your survey. Make two passes through these papers. If they all cite a key paper that you did not find earlier, obtain and read it, iterating as necessary (访问这些顶级会议的网站并查看最近的会议记录。快速扫描并找出最近的高质量相关工作，这些论文和之前你放在旁边的论文构成你survey的第一个版本，重复两轮，如果它们都引用你之前没找到的论文，去把他找出来并阅读。)

Related work

If you are reading a paper to do a review, you should also read Timothy Roscoe’s paper on Writing reviews for systems conferences" [3]. If you’re planning to write a technical paper, you should refer both to Henning Schulzrinne’s comprehensive web site [4] and George Whitesides’s excellent overview of the process [5]. Finally, Simon Peyton Jones has a website that covers the entire spectrum of research skills [2].Iain H. McLean of Psychology, Inc. has put together a downloadable ‘review matrix’ that simplifies paper reviewing using the three-pass approach for papers in experimental psychology[1], which can probably be used, with minor modifications, for papers in other areas.

References

[1] I.H. McLean, Literature Review Matrix,"
http://psychologyinc.blogspot.com/
[2] S. Peyton Jones, Research Skills,"
http://research.microsoft.com/en
us/um/people/simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a
talk.htm
[3] T. Roscoe, Writing Reviews for Systems Conferences,"
http://people.inf.ethz.ch/troscoe/pubs/review-writing.pdf
[4] H. Schulzrinne, Writing Technical Articles,"
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/∼hgs/etc/writing-style.html
[5] G.M. Whitesides, Whitesides’ Group: Writing a Paper,"
http://www.ee.ucr.edu/∼rlake/Whitesides writing res paper.pdf